


B.U.C.K.Y.

by MarvelousMenagerie (HiddenOne)



Series: Imagine Tony & Bucky fills by hddnone [4]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Artifical Intelligence BUCKY, M/M, winter soldier - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 11:08:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13293561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HiddenOne/pseuds/MarvelousMenagerie
Summary: ITAB prompt:Imagine Bucky is believed to be dead when he fell from the train, Steve grieves for his friend to this very day, Tony helps create an accurate Bucky AI with Steve (maybe BARF was made to help in the process). Bucky AI falls in love with Tony. Winter Soldier is discovered to be Bucky. WS Bucky can only regain partial memory due to excessive erasing/damage from HYDRA, becomes fond of Tony. Consents to converging with Bucky AI to regain memory and so Bucky AI can also have a body to love Tony.





	B.U.C.K.Y.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at the ImagineTonyandBucky tumblr. All credit for this lovely prompt/idea goes to novarain01!

Tony blames Thor.

The mission had been tough, though that wasn’t Thor’s fault. The celebration afterward - that had been Thor’s fault. Victorious battles must be ended with much revelry, and of course all of Thor’s shield brothers must participate. Getting Steve Rogers drunk on Asgardian mead hadn’t taken as much prodding as Tony had suspected. 

The problem is that Steve Rogers doesn’t party when he gets drunk. He mopes. 

Steve talks endlessly about Bucky Barnes. Bucky Barnes saving Steve in back alleys and Bucky Barnes trying to find Steve dates and Bucky Barnes always having a comeback and Bucky Barnes dancing and Bucky Barnes fighting and...Bucky had Steve’s back, Bucky was ‘till the end of the line.’

Tony is the one who ends up under Steve’s heavy, listless weight listening to this, because Tony dared to take a sip of the drink ‘not meant for mortal men’ and is now sharing stories right back. Tony tells Steve about Edwin Jarvis, and how he taught Tony how to be a human, how to be kind, how to pick himself up and keep going. How Jarvis had been there, always, to have Tony’s back until the day he couldn’t. Until the end of a line that ended too soon.

Even drunk, Steve puts two and two together. 

“Did it help?” Steve slurs, gesturing to the ceiling. “When you made JARVIS?”

Tony takes another sip from his cup, one that now contains Midgardian-only mead. He takes another sip, and then another, but Steve is still looking at him with sad blue eyes.

“No,” Tony coughs up. “But now I have J, so…” he shrugs.

Steve nods and stares out the window for long enough that Tony forgets what they’d been talking about for a moment. “I’d take… anything. Anything I could get, of Bucky. Even just to hear his voice calling me a jerk.” Steve huffs a laugh, one that isn’t at all humorous. “He’d - he’d have handled this whole future thing so much better than me. You’d have liked him, I bet you, right off the bat.”

 

Tony blames Steve.

Despite the frightening hangover the next morning for all parties involved, Tony doesn’t forget Steve’s words. He and Steve might have gotten off on the wrong foot on their first meeting - and a few following - but that doesn’t mean Tony can’t feel for the guy. And if Steve is envious of Tony keeping JARVIS around, rather than mocking, well then...Tony can build Steve a BUCKY.

BUCKY: Bundles of Unholy Circuitry for a Kickass Yank

Admittedly, not one of Tony’s best acronyms. He hopes that Steve doesn’t ask if BUCKY stands for something. The actual programming, though, that is some of Tony’s best work. He copies some of the foundation from JARVIS - after asking JARVIS for permission - and gets to work in coding something capable of giving Steve a piece of his best buddy back.

“BUCKY, up and at ‘em. You’ve got some catching up to do,” Tony beckons when he boots BUCKY up for another test run.

“Ugh, five more minutes,” BUCKY grumbles, but then the holographic face of James Barnes smiles at him from the screen. It had taken a bit more time than Tony had liked to get BUCKY to banter back, a learning curve that Tony had kept from Steve. And a curve that Tony still is keeping from Steve, though definitely not because Tony is nervous about telling Steve about the BUCKY project - definitely not that. Tony’s work has to be, well, not perfect, it will never be that, but good enough. Good enough for the memory of James Barnes, and good enough for Steve. 

“Sass, sass, sass. That’s all I get,” Tony replies, smiling in return. “How are the circuits, or do you need those five minutes to process in your old age?”

BUCKY pauses, considers. “Better,” he says, as he continues to crunch the data Tony has compiled on the other screen. “Faster. Am I up to speed yet, darlin’, or you still keeping me all to yourself?”

Tony grins. “Oh baby, you’re all mine for now. Got a few more paces to put you through.”

“Well now you’ve got me rarin’ to go.”

So Tony hates Steve, a little, for this idea. Programming BUCKY is nothing like JARVIS, because now Tony has no logical defenses of ‘building an AI hasn’t been done before, not like this,’ or even ‘if he’s going to make a butler AI than of course it makes sense to base him on Edwin Jarvis.’ Now Tony has a fun, snarky BUCKY-shaped problem that he’s getting a little too attached to in ways very different from Tony’s affections for JARVIS. 

Tony finds himself too often sitting back and admiring BUCKY, and BUCKY’s perseverance and tenacity to learn, to improve, to understand, to grow, and Tony is sure he didn’t program that himself. Perhaps BUCKY had picked it up from the stories of James Barnes that Tony had slowly, secretly been drawing out of Steve and recording, or from the all the scanned video reels and photographs Tony could get his hands on. Tony isn’t the expert, not on James Barnes, but he tried to give BUCKY as much of the original man as he could find for BUCKY to learn from.

Well, perhaps time to let BUCKY find his wings before something like Stockholm Syndrome set in - and with Tony’s luck, BUCKY would start crushing on JARVIS instead. 

Steve’s jaw drops and his face pales when Tony brings him down to the workshop to reveal BUCKY’s smiling face from a screen.

“B-Bucky?”

“Hey Stevie. We’re looking pretty good for old men, ain’t we?”

“Oh my God,” Steve breathes, his eyes rapidly filling with tears. 

Tony backs away, slowly, to let them have a moment, as many moments as they want. 

“Jerk,” BUCKY replies, fond and teasing. “You think I’d let you see the future without me?”

Steve grabs Tony before he can finish sliding away completely. Steve reels him back in, tears now sliding freely down his face as he brings Tony in for a bear of a hug that Tony only squirms a little for. 

“Tony, how did you…?”

“I mean, he’s no JARVIS, so the brains bit wasn’t all that hard…”

Steve talks over BUCKY’s protest. “No, he’s Bucky. My Bucky. Thank you.  _ Thank you _ . God, Tony, this is more than… this is more than I ever could’ve asked for.”

Tony would bet that Steve wishes he could hug Bucky, that maybe that’s what he’s standing in for right now, here in Steve’s arms, but he’ll take it. 

Then Tony runs away to let Steve talk with BUCKY. 

 

Next, Tony blames JARVIS.

“Stop frowning or I’ll let your face freeze like that,” Tony says after BUCKY lets loose another heartbroken sigh accompanied with a pout.

“I’m bored,” BUCKY whines. 

“Play with DUM-E. Or Steve,” Tony suggests as he steps back to frown at the Iron Man boot giving him trouble. He knows the roller skates will come in handy someday, but at the moment they’re limiting the space he needs to boost power to the repulsors. 

“DUM-E is charging and Steve’s on a mission. Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”

“Ha, ha,” Tony pretends to laugh as he circles the table, analyzing from multiple angles.

“With the permission of all parties, I might have an idea,” JARVIS chimes in.

“Share with the class, J,” Tony agrees, waving him on. 

JARVIS’ idea is to teach Bucky to hack satellites, CCTV cameras, ATMs, anything with a visual angle so that BUCKY can keep an eye on Steve - and all the Avengers - when they’re out in the field. BUCKY is thrilled at the idea, and Tony is only too happy to have JARVIS take over so Tony can get back to work.

Steve, when he finds out, simply laughs. Bucky had been the best sniper Steve knows (“Hey!” Clint protests), and Steve is ecstatic to have Bucky watching his back again. 

“No offense, JARVIS,” Steve says.

“None taken, Captain. I am only too happy to delegate this task. Mr. Stark keeps my servers busy enough as it is.”

“I heard that,” Tony mumbles.

BUCKY has all of the Avengers’ back, calling out approaching enemies or trapped civilians or a place to get pizza afterwards. But BUCKY sticks closest to Steve, and that means BUCKY has a front row seat when Steve finds the Winter Soldier. 

“Bucky?” Steve asks.

BUCKY doesn’t reply because Steve doesn’t mean him. Tony blames Steve for that bit, too, but JARVIS gets all the credit for making BUCKY watch it in real time. 

“Who the hell is Bucky?” the Winter Soldier asks in return. 

 

Tony blames Hydra. 

Tony learns, Steve learns, BUCKY learns, the whole team learns about the Winter Soldier. A ghost story originating from Hydra, handlers taking a fallen James Barnes, not yet dead, and turned him into a deadly weapon - an Asset with no memory of James Barnes, of Bucky, taking him out and only keeping the remaining skills. 

Now everytime Steve looks at BUCKY, it’s an equal toss up whether he’ll start punching things or crying.

“Babe,” Tony calls out, down in the workshop.

“Not now,” BUCKY says, brushes him off to disappear in a whirl of pixels.

When they finally get their hands on Barnes… there turns out not to be much of Barnes left. Enough to recognize Steve, to know that sometime, somewhere, he knew Steve. Days, weeks, months of Steve and BUCKY sharing memories, of watching videos, of seeing photographs, do nothing more than tell the Winter Soldier of the past life he used to have before Hydra erased it from his brain and wrote their own protocols. The Winter Soldier doesn’t regain any of his lost memories.

“You coded BUCKY,” the Winter Soldier tells Tony one day when he walks into the workshop of his own volition - a surprise, and an improvement.

“Yes, I did,” Tony answers. He continues working. The simulations he and JARVIS had run on handling this scenario tended to be better when Tony didn’t challenge the Soldier with too much eye contact.

“Can you reprogram me?” the Soldier asks.

Tony breathes, sighs, and shakes his head. “No, I can’t.”

The Soldier nods his acceptance, face still as blank as when he came in, and leaves.

“That’s a lie,” BUCKY accuses, shoving aside the blueprints Tony is working on to confront him.

“I can’t,” Tony repeats, turning away from BUCKY. “Not the way he wants, the way Steve hopes. Artificial intelligence isn’t the same as human.”

“It’s good enough for both of them, I would guess,” BUCKY continues. He pops over to another screen in Tony’s line of sight, then another when Tony turns again. 

Tony itches to mute BUCKY but can’t quite bring himself to give the order. 

“Good enough for you, I would’ve thought,” BUCKY hits him with.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Tony asks, suddenly livid.

“Means he could look at you the way I do. Means he could touch you, the way I want to. Means a lot of things, don’t ‘cha think?” BUCKY asks, a half-smile on his face that hurts Tony to see.

“He’s not you. He’ll never be  _ you _ ,” Tony insists, grabbing the table to stop himself from grabbing the monitor. 

“He could be, if you tried.”

Tony goes cold. This isn’t part of any situation he and JARVIS had tried to prepare for, when the fallout of BUCKY versus the Winter Soldier became inevitable. BUCKY was supposed to the angry one, and Steve the one pushing for some sort of fix. Not BUCKY asking this of Tony, not BUCKY ceding to the Winter Soldier. 

“I won’t,” Tony says.

“He’s the one who could hold you through the nightmares, doll. You don’t want someone kissing you good mornin’? Dragging you out to lunch? Comin’ back to make love to you on top of your fancy cars you got over there?”

“Don’t ever speak of desecrating my Roadster like that again,” Tony warns.

BUCKY ignores him and instead appears as a complete projection right in front of him. A blue, holographic hand reaches out to touch Tony’s face and simply passes right through. “There’s so many things I want to give to you, and I can’t,” BUCKY whispers. “He can.”

Tony sets his feet, squares his jaw. “I won’t,” he repeats, challenging BUCKY. “I am not Hydra, to go digging around in someone’s brain to program them to be whatever I decide. The Soldier makes his own choices. He’ll be who  _ he _ decides, not me.”

Later, the Winter Soldier returns. Tony gives himself two breaths before he turns to greet him.

“I want you to reprogram me, to be more like Barnes. I don’t want to be the Asset. I want to be him.”

Tony laughs without humor. “Did BUCKY tell you to say that? Never mind, just… no. My answer is no.”

That time, when the Winter Soldier leaves, Tony has JARVIS lock down the workshop. Not even BUCKY can get through the firewalls to talk to him.

 

Then, Tony has no one to blame but himself.

Just because he won’t do it doesn’t mean that Tony doesn’t figure out how. It’s even simpler than anyone could guess, given how Hydra primed the Winter Soldier’s mind for their own commands. Pop BUCKY’s program into some nanobots, inject the Winter Soldier, and in a matter of minutes the bots would cross the blood-brain barrier to let BUCKY ram through the remaining bits of Hydra programming left and sync up with the Soldier’s brain. A merging, without any reprogramming, no starting from scratch.

No risk in building Bucky Barnes back up only to have him not fall back in love with Tony, too.

Steve would get Bucky back, Tony would keep the BUCKY he has, and the Soldier would get a handler that cares. Win/win/win, really. 

Except Tony can’t. He can’t overwrite a man’s brain just because he wants a boyfriend he can touch. The man has been through more than enough, had his brain scrambled too much. Just because BUCKY can put the right words in the Winter Soldier’s mouth doesn’t mean the Soldier can give consent to this. 

And then the Tower is attacked. Hydra, again, coming to take back their Asset. 

Clint breaks an arm, Tony bruises his ribs, and Steve cuts his hands. Even JARVIS gets injured, overwritten and broken apart in the attack, but then BUCKY had thrown himself full-force at Hydra to defend JARVIS while Tony was too busy neutralizing a bomb set to go off in his own damn living room.

The Avengers, including the Winter Soldier, are left standing - all except for BUCKY.

Tony heads to the workshop immediately to pull up BUCKY’s code. He staggers back as he realizes how BUCKY had been torn apart, to protect JARVIS, to protect the Avengers, to protect the Winter Soldier.

“I’m sorry, sir,” JARVIS tells him in the quiet, his own voice still slow from the damage.

“Hey baby,” BUCKY says, his image distorted and blurred as he appears. “Might take more than a metal arm to fix this mess.” His projection pixelates, disappears, reappears. BUCKY winces as he fades out again. 

“I can fix this,” Tony assures, his fingers flying at the keys. “I can fix this!”

“Tony?” Steve asks, entering the workshop with the Winter Soldier right behind him. “Is he okay?”

“He will be,” Tony promises, not turning away from the two screens scrolling code. “Hydra left a ton of surprises in my systems that are effectively trying to tear BUCKY apart, even now. If I could just shore up his code to hibernate him off in a safer server, that would be work until I can fix J and clear the systems, and then I can -” 

“Sir,” JARVIS says softly. “You are running out of time.”

Tony’s fingers go faster, scrolling through the code and fixing every mistake he finds. 

“J still has some damage, isn’t calculating things properly,” Tony says as his eyes burn. He stops his fingers from trembling. BUCKY glitches right in front of him, and Tony feels like he’s witnessing BUCKY’s code dying in front of his eyes, at his fingertips. 

The Winter Soldier comes up and stands next to him. 

And Tony reaches for what he told himself he should not take. 

“Did you mean it?” Tony barks. “When you said you wanted to be Bucky again, did you mean it?” He can’t look away from the code, from the fix he still needs to make no matter the Soldier’s response.

Seconds tick by in Tony’s brain as the Soldier remains silent. Then, “Yes. James Barnes has… friends. A team. A life. I want to experience that.”

“Even if you die, and all that remains is my code?” Tony pushes.

“Tony-” Steve interrupts.

“Have to mention any potential side effects. It could not work at all. Could work too well, and BUCKY would overtake his entire brain. Could kill them both, not like I can test this out,” Tony rambles, his fingers still flying at the keys.

“I will do it.”

“Buck -” Steve tries again, his face concerned.

“I will,” the Soldier repeats, firm. “I...BUCKY has been my ally. This is repayment, and if I perish in the process than I hope a better…  _ man _ is in control of this body. Do it,” he orders Tony.

Tony finishes a last patchwork repair on BUCKY’s code before he corrals it off to be copied over into the nanobots. Tony pulls out the needle and syringe while he explains the process to the Winter Soldier, how Hydra primed the Soldier’s brain for their commands but also for code in general. BUCKY’s code will piggyback off the logic structures Hydra left in the Soldier’s brain, and use them to connect and sync.

When the nanobots are programmed, Tony fills the syringe. He turns to the Winter Soldier, who nods. Steve hovers over the both of them as Tony injects the Winter Soldier’s right arm.  When done, Tony steps back. There’s nothing more he can do. Either BUCKY is safe, or Tony wrecked everything. He breathes out a shaky breath.

“How long will it take?” Steve asks. “Until we know it works or…?”

“The bots won’t take long to reach his brain,” Tony says. “After that, I don’t know.”

Thirty seconds later, the Winter Soldier’s eyes roll to the back of his head and he falls unconscious. Steve catches him before he hits the ground.

Steve is settling the Soldier on the couch when the Soldier’s eyes flutter open again, blank.

“...Buck?” Steve asks, and Tony races over to peer over Steve’s shoulder.

The Soldier’s face remains blank, un-seeing, for several moments. Then his eyes clear, and he gives Steve a tired half-smile. “Hey Stevie. Fancy seeing you here.”

“Bucky,” Steve cries out and hugs him tight. 

“Hey doll,” BUCKY, the Soldier, or some combination greets Tony over Steve’s shoulder.

Tony grabs a hand, squeezes. Bucky squeezes back, smile now bright. 

“Good to have you back,” Tony chokes out.

“Stevie, quit your dramatics so I can hug my fella for a moment, yeah?” Bucky says.

Steve huffs and pushes Bucky at Tony. “Good riddance. Knew from the start you two would be trouble.”

“Well, it’s three of us now,” Bucky admits. He wraps his arms tight around Tony.

Yeah, Tony doesn’t really have any regrets about how this all worked out. Except that now the remaining panic and adrenaline drains from him, and he ends up shaking in Bucky’s arms. 

“Soldier is still here, too. I think we’ll be able to work something out. But first, I gotta do somethin’.”

Tony looks up, confused. Bucky smiles at him, a bright grin that makes his eyes sparkle. 

Then Bucky kisses him. 


End file.
